Environmentalists have made a very worrying discovery. Residues of the ‘forever chemical’ trifluoroacetate were found in two of the five Austrian mineral water samples.
In the spring of 2024, environmental activists from Global 2000 and the European Pesticide Action Network (PAN Europe) collected mineral water samples from bottles in their original packaging from bottlers in Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Hungary. They then had it analyzed whether it contained TFA. This substance is one of the per- and polyfluorinated alkyl compounds, or PFAS for short, that are increasingly being banned in the European Union due to their many harmful effects on health.
Breakdown product of certain pesticides
It is the “terminal breakdown product” of about 2,000 PFAS and is considered a “forever chemical” because of its high persistence, Helmut Burtscher-Schaden of Global 2000 explained at an online press conference on Tuesday. Contamination with trans fatty acids is mainly the result of the use of certain pesticides in agriculture.
Overall, TFA was detectable in ten of nineteen bottlers in the countries surveyed. “There, TFA has already found its way into the groundwater bodies, which are supposedly protected from anthropogenic (man-made) pollutants and are often hundreds of meters deep, where our mineral water comes from,” the environmental protection organizations said in a press release. However, the amounts are not harmful to health: even a high daily consumption of two liters of the most polluted mineral water (from Belgium) would not exceed the health guidelines that apply to an adult in the European Union.
Bottlers wanted to avoid presenting the results
The consequences of this pollution could threaten the survival of mineral water bottlers, which typically have little impact on the pollution, Burtscher-Schaden said. According to the chemist, the affected bottlers had also made a “clear demand not to publish the results” to the environmental protection organization. In one case, legal action was even threatened “to protect the reputation of the affected brand and to obtain compensation for the damage suffered.”
Source: Krone
I am an experienced and passionate journalist with a strong track record in news website reporting. I specialize in technology coverage, breaking stories on the latest developments and trends from around the world. Working for Today Times Live has given me the opportunity to write thought-provoking pieces that have caught the attention of many readers.
